A Single Man

by Christopher Isherwood

  George laughs in an appropriately sardonic manner, since this is what Grant expects of him. But this gallows-humour sickens his heart. In all those old crises of the twenties, the thirties, the war – each one of them has left its traces upon George, like an illness – what was terrible was the fear of annihilation. Now we have with us a far more terrible fear, the fear of survival. Survival into a Rubble Age, in which it will be quite natural for Mr Strunk to gun down Grant and his wife and three children, because Grant has neglected to lay in sufficient stores of food and they are starving and may therefore possibly become dangerous and this is no time for sentiment.

  ‘There’s Cynthia,’ Grant says, as they re-enter the dining-room. ‘Want to join her?’

  ‘Do we have to?’

  ‘I guess so.’ Grant giggles nervously. ‘She’s seen us.’

  And indeed Cynthia Leach is waving to them. She is a handsome young New Yorker, Sarah Lawrence-trained, the daughter of a rich family. Maybe it was partly to annoy them that she recently married Leach, who teaches history here. But their marriage seems to work quite well. Though Andy is slim and white-skinned, he is no weakling; his eyes sparkle sexily and he has the unaggressive litheness of one who takes a great deal of exercise in bed. He is somewhat out of his league socially, but no doubt he enjoys the extra effort required to keep up with Cynthia. They give parties to which everyone comes because the food and drink are lavish, thanks to Cynthia’s money, and Andy is popular anyhow and Cynthia isn’t that bad. Her only trouble is that she thinks of herself as an Eastern aristocrat slumming; she tries to be patrician and is merely patronising.

  ‘Andy stood me up,’ Cynthia tells him. ‘Talk to me.’ Then, as they sit down at her table, she turns to Grant. ‘Your wife’s never going to forgive me.’

  ‘Oh?’ Grant laughs with quite extraordinary violence.

  ‘She didn’t tell you about it?’

  ‘Not a word!’

  ‘She didn’t?’ Cynthia is disappointed. Then she brightens, ‘Oh, but she must be mad at me! I was telling her how hideously they dress the children here.’

  ‘But she agreed with you, I’m sure. She’s always talking about it.’

  ‘They’re being cheated out of their childhood,’ Cynthia says, ignoring this. ‘They’re being turned into junior consumers! All those dreadful dainty little creatures, wearing lipstick! I was down in Mexico last month. It was like a breath of fresh air. Oh, I can’t tell you! Their children are so real. No anxiety. No other-direction. They just bloom —’

  ‘The only question is —’ Grant begins. Obviously, he is starting not to agree with Cynthia. For this very reason, he mumbles, he can barely be heard. Cynthia chooses not to hear him.

  ‘And then that night we came back across the border! Shall I ever forget it! I said to myself, either these people are insane or I am. They all seemed to be running, the way they do in the old silent newsreels. And the hostess in the restaurant – it had never struck me before how truly sinister it is to call them that. The way she smiled at us! And those enormous menus, with nothing on them that was really edible. And those weird zombie busboys, bringing nothing but glasses of water and simply refusing to speak to you! I just could not believe my own eyes. . . . Oh, and then we stayed the night at one of these ghastly new motels. I had the feeling that it had only just been brought from some place else, some factory, and set up exactly one minute before we arrived. It didn’t belong anywhere. I mean – after all those marvellous old hotels in Mexico – each one of them is really a place – but this was just utterly unreal —’

  Again, Grant seems about to attempt some kind of a protest. But this time his mumbling is still lower. Even George can’t understand him. George takes a big drink of his coffee, feels the kick of it in his nearly empty stomach, and finds himself suddenly high. ‘Really, Cynthia my dear!’ he hears himself exclaim. ‘How can you talk such incredible nonsense?’

  Grant giggles with astonishment. Cynthia looks surprised but rather pleased. She is the kind of bully who likes being challenged; it soothes the itch of her aggression.

  ‘Honestly! Are you out of your mind?’ George feels himself racing down the runway; becoming smoothly, exhilaratingly airborne. ‘My God, you sound like some dreary French intellectual who’s just set foot in New York for the first time! That’s exactly the way they talk! Unreal! American motels are unreal! My good girl – you know and I know that our motels are deliberately designed to be unreal, if you must use that idiotic jargon, for the very simple reason that an American motel-room isn’t a room in an hotel, it’s the Room, definitively, period. There is only one; The Room. And it’s a symbol – an advertisement in three dimensions, if you like – for our way of life. And what’s our way of life? A building code which demands certain measurements, certain utilities and the use of certain apt materials; no more and no less. Everything else you’ve got to supply for yourself. But just try telling that to the Europeans! It scares them to death. . . . The truth is, our way of life is far too austere for them. We’ve reduced the things of the material plane to mere symbolic conveniences. And why? Because that’s the essential first step. Until the material plane has been defined and relegated to its proper place, the mind can’t ever be truly free. One would think that was obvious. The stupidest American seems to understand it intuitively. But the Europeans call us inhuman – or they prefer to say immature, which sounds ruder – because we’ve renounced their world of individual differences, and romantic inefficiency, and objects-for-the-sake-of-objects. All that dead old cult of cathedrals and first editions and Paris models and vintage wines. Naturally, they never give up, they keep trying to subvert us, every moment, with their loathsome cult-propaganda. If they ever succeed, we’ll be done for. That’s the kind of subversion the Un-American Activities Committee ought to be investigating. . . . The Europeans hate us because we’ve retired to live inside our advertisements, like hermits going into caves to contemplate. We sleep in symbolic bedrooms, eat symbolic meals, are symbolically entertained – and that terrifies them, that fills them with fury and loathing because they can never understand it. They keep yelling out, “these people are zombies!”. They’ve got to make themselves believe that, because the alternative is to break down and admit that Americans are able to live like this because, actually, they’re a far far more advanced culture – five hundred, maybe a thousand years ahead of Europe, or anyone else on earth, for that matter. Essentially, we’re creatures of spirit. Our life is all in the mind. That’s why we’re completely at home with symbols like the American Motel-Room. Whereas the European has a horror of symbols because he’s such a grovelling little materialist —’

  Some moments before the end of this wild word-flight, George has seen, as it were from a great altitude, Andy Leach enter the dining-room. Which is indeed a lucky deliverance, for already George has felt his engines cut out, felt himself losing thrust. So now, with the skill of a veteran pilot, he swoops down to a perfect landing. And the beauty of it is, he appears to stop talking out of mere politeness, because Andy has reached their table.

  ‘Did I miss something?’ Andy asks, grinning.

  A performer at the circus has no theatre-curtain to come down and hide him and thus preserve the magic spell of his act unbroken. Poised high on the trapeze under the blazing arcs, he has flashed and pulsed like a star indeed. But now, grounded, unsparkling, unfollowed by spotlights yet plainly visible to anyone who cares to look at him – they are all watching the clowns – he hurries past the tiers of seats toward the exit. Nobody applauds him any more. Very few spare him a single glance.

  Together with this anonymity, George feels a fatigue come over him which is not disagreeable. The tide of his vitality is ebbing fast, and he ebbs with it, content. This is a way of resting. All of a sudden, he is much, much older. On his way out to the parking-lot he walks differently, with less elasticity, moving his arms and his shoulders stiffly. He slows down. Now and then, his steps actually shuffle. His head is bowed. His mo
uth loosens and the muscles of his cheeks sag. His face takes on a dull dreamy placid look. He hums queerly to himself, with a sound like bees around a hive. From time to time, as he walks, he emits quite loud prolonged farts.

  The hospital stands tall on a sleepy by-passed hill, rising from steep lawns and flowering bushes, within sight of the freeway itself. A tall reminder to the passing motorists – this is the end of the road, folks – it has a pleasant aspect, nevertheless. It stands open to all the breezes; and there must be many of its windows from which you can see the ocean and the Palos Verdes headland and even Catalina Island, in the clear winter weather.

  The nurses at the reception-desk are pleasant, too. They don’t fuss you with a lot of questions. If you know the number of the room you want to visit, you don’t even have to ask for their permission; you can go right up.

  George works the elevator himself. At the second floor it is stopped and a coloured male nurse wheels in a prone patient. She is for surgery, he tells George, so they must descend again to the ground floor where the operating rooms are. George offers respectfully to get off the elevator but the young nurse (who has very sexy muscular arms) says, ‘You don’t have to’, so there he stands, like a spectator at the funeral of a stranger, furtively peeking at the patient. She appears to be fully conscious, but it would be a kind of sacrilege to speak to her; for already she is the dedicated, the ritually prepared victim. She seems to know this and consent to it; to be entirely relaxed in her consent. Her grey hair looks so pretty; it must have been recently waved.

  This is the gate, George says to himself.

  Must I pass through here, too?

  Ah, how the poor body recoils with its every nerve from the sight, the smell, the feel of this place! Blindly it shies, rears, struggles to escape. That it should ever be brought here – stupefied by their drugs, pricked by their needles, cut by their little knives – what an unthinkable outrage to the flesh! Even if they were to cure it and release it, it could never forget, never forgive. Nothing would be the same, any more. It would have lost all faith in itself.

  Jim used to moan and complain and raise hell over a head-cold, a cut finger, a pile. But Jim was lucky at the end; the only time when luck really counts. The truck hit his car just right; he never felt it. And they never got him into a place like this one. His smashed leavings were of no use to them for their rituals.

  Doris’s room is on the top floor. The hallway is deserted, for the moment, and the door stands open with a screen hiding the bed. George peeps over the top of the screen before going in. Doris is lying with her face toward the window.

  George has gotten quite accustomed by now to the way she looks. It isn’t even horrible to him any more, because he has lost his sense of a transformation. Doris no longer seems changed. She is a different creature altogether; this yellow shrivelled manikin with its sticks of arms and legs, withered flesh and hollow belly, making angular outlines under the sheet. What has it to do with that big arrogant animal of a girl? With that body which sprawled stark naked, gaping wide in shameless demand, underneath Jim’s naked body? Gross insucking vulva, sly ruthless greedy flesh, in all the bloom and gloss and arrogant resilience of youth, demanding that George shall step aside, bow down and yield to the female prerogative, hide his unnatural head in shame. I am Doris. I am Woman. I am Bitch-Mother Nature. The Church and the Law and the State exist to support me. I claim my biological rights. I demand Jim.

  George has sometimes asked himself: Would I ever, even in those days, have wished this on her?

  The answer is No. Not because George would be incapable of such fiendishness; but because Doris, then, was infinitely more than Doris, was Woman the Enemy, claiming Jim for herself. No use destroying Doris, or ten thousand Dorises, as long as Woman triumphs. Woman could only be fought by yielding, by letting Jim go away with her on that trip to Mexico. By urging him to satisfy all his curiosity and flattered vanity and lust (vanity, mostly) on the gamble that he would return (as he did) saying she’s disgusting, saying never again.

  And wouldn’t you be twice as disgusted, Jim, if you could see her now? Wouldn’t you feel a crawling horror to think that maybe, even then, her body you fondled and kissed hungrily and entered with your aroused flesh already held seeds of this rottenness? You used to bathe the sores on cats so gently and you never minded the stink of old diseased dogs; yet you had a horror, in spite of yourself, of human sickness and people who were crippled. I know something, Jim. I feel certain of it. You’d refuse absolutely to visit her here. You wouldn’t be able to force yourself to do it.

  George walks around the screen and into the room, making just the necessary amount of noise. Doris turns her head and sees him, seemingly without surprise. Probably, for her, the line between reality and hallucination is getting very thin. Figures keep appearing, disappearing. If one of them sticks you with a needle, then you can be sure it actually is a nurse. George may be George or, again, he may not. For convenience she will treat him as George. Why not? What does it matter, either way?

  ‘Hello,’ she says. Her eyes are a wild brilliant blue in her sick yellow face.

  ‘Hello, Doris.’

  A good while since, George has stopped bringing her flowers or other gifts. There is nothing of any significance he can bring into this room from the outside, now; even himself. Everything that matters to her is now right here in this room, where she is absorbed in the business of dying. Her preoccupation doesn’t seem egotistic, however; it does not exclude George or anyone else who cares to share in it. This preoccupation is with death, and we can all share in that, at any time, at any age, well or ill.

  George sits down beside her now and takes her hand. If he had done this even two months ago, it would have been loathsomely false. (One of his most bitterly shameful memories is of a time he kissed her cheek – was it aggression, masochism? oh, damn all such words! – right after he found out she’d been to bed with Jim. Jim was there when it happened. When George moved toward her to kiss her, Jim’s eyes looked startled and scared, as if he feared George was about to bite her like a snake.) But now taking Doris’s hand isn’t false, isn’t even an act of compassion. It is necessary – he has discovered this on previous visits – in order to establish even partial contact. And, holding her hand, he feels less embarrassed by her sickness; for the gesture means, we are on the same road, I shall follow you soon. He is thus excused from having to ask those ghastly sickroom questions, how are you? how’s it going? how do you feel?

  Doris smiles faintly. Is it because she’s pleased that he has come?

  No. She is smiling with amusement, it seems. Speaking low but very distinctly, she says, ‘I made such a noise, yesterday.’

  George smiles too, waiting for the joke.

  ‘Was it yesterday?’ This is in the same tone, but addressed to herself. Her eyes no longer see him; they look bewildered and a bit scared. Time must have become a very odd kind of mirror-maze for her, now; and mazes can change, at any instant, from being funny to being frightening.

  But now the eyes are aware of him again; the bewilderment has passed. ‘I was screaming. They heard me clear down the hall. They had to fetch the doctor.’ Doris smiles. This, apparently, is the joke.

  ‘Was it your back?’ George asks. The effort to keep sympathy out of his voice makes him speak primly, like someone who is trying to suppress an ungentlemanly native accent. But Doris disregards the question – she is off in some new direction of her own, frowning a little. She asks abruptly, ‘What time is it?’

  ‘Nearly three.’

  There is a long silence. George feels a terrible need to say something, anything:

  ‘I was out on the pier the other day. I hadn’t been there in ages. And, do you know, they’ve torn down the old roller-skating rink? Isn’t that a shame? It seems as if they can’t bear to leave anything the way it used to be. Do you remember that booth where the woman used to read your character from your handwriting. That’s gone too —’

  He
stops short, dismayed.

  Can memory really get away with such a crude trick? Seemingly it can. For he has picked the pier from it as casually as you pick a card at random from a magician’s deck – and behold, the card has been forced! It was while George and Jim were roller-skating that they first met Doris. (She was with a boy named Norman whom she quickly ditched.) And later they all went to have their handwriting read. And the woman told Jim that he had latent musical talent, and Doris that she had a great capacity for bringing out the best in other people —

  Does she remember? Of course she must! George glances at her anxiously. She lies staring at the ceiling, frowning harder.

  ‘What did you say the time was?’

  ‘Nearly three. Four minutes of.’

  ‘Look outside in the hall, will you? See if anyone’s there.’

  He gets up, goes to the door, looks out. But, before he has even reached it, she has asked with harsh impatience, ‘Well?’

  ‘There’s no one.’

  ‘Where’s that fucking nurse?’ It comes out of her so harshly, so nakedly desperate.

  ‘Shall I go look for her?’

  ‘She knows I get a shot at three. The doctor told her. She doesn’t give a shit.’

  ‘I’ll find her.’

  ‘That bitch won’t come till she’s good and ready.’

  ‘I’m sure I can find her.’

  ‘No! Stay here.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Sit down again.’

  ‘Sure.’ He sits down. He knows she wants his hand. He gives it to her. She grips it with astonishing strength.

  ‘George —’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘You’ll stay here till she comes?’

  ‘Of course I will.’

  Her grip tightens. There is no affection in it, no communication. She isn’t gripping a fellow-creature. His hand is just something to grip. He dare not ask her about the pain. He is afraid of releasing some obscene horror, something visible and tangible and stinking, right here between them, in the room.